Justice for Janitors: Organizing Immigrant Workers (Part Four)
"One industry, one contract, one union." —Justice for Janitors slogan
By Fred Glass
As the Trump administration demonizes and terrorizes immigrant worker communities it’s worth a look back at the Justice for Janitors campaigns of the last couple decades of the twentieth century. The energy, creativity, courage and power of this movement of immigrant workers reminds us that with the right strategies and tactics, backed by enough resources, even the most seemingly vulnerable working class populations can find their way to victory over their ruling class adversaries. Here is Part Four of this story, excerpted out of From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement. You can read Part One here, Part Two here, and Part Three here.
Sacramento: slow motion replay
Initial expectations in late 1994 were high among SEIU Local 1877 leadership that it could quickly replicate its Los Angeles and Silicon Valley victories in Sacramento. But the contractor it went up against, Somers Building Maintenance, employing more than a thousand janitors, proved a tough adversary.
In Los Angeles and San Jose SEIU could rely on solid connections with the local labor movement and progressive politicians to launch and sustain its campaigns. In Sacramento, the union faced a more conservative political context, and one in which it had to build its local coalition from scratch. Eventually deploying the same array of tactics as in the earlier efforts, the struggle took four and a half years before ending in a union contract.
At the start, SEIU efforts to interest the California Department of Labor, under the control of a conservative Republican administration, in the company's many wage and hour violations—failure to pay overtime, short pay for hours worked, employing children—went nowhere.
After a majority of Somers workers had signed cards, and the union asked for recognition, instead Somers hired a notorious anti-union law firm, Littler, Mendelsohn, Fastiff and Tichy, which enaged in various delaying tactics. These included creation of a company union. A blatant violation of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) prohibition, nonetheless it took a year for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to order the company to disband the "union," invalidate its "contract," and reimburse janitors for dues taken out of their paychecks.
Local 1877 built a coalition with other unions, local churches, and community organizations and began to unleash its now familiar repertoire of tactics: a public accountability hearing; demonstrations in front of buildings owned by clients of Somers that featured Latino community organizations and union members; and civil disobedience in summer 1997, when participants sat down on the K Street light rail tracks, eventuating in thirty arrests, including California Labor Federation secretary treasurer Art Pulaski, his lobbyist, Bill Camp, and building trades leader Jim Murphy.
These activities drove the Democratic mayor of Sacramento, Joe Serna, who prided himself on his early UFW activism, yet had done nothing to aid the campaign so far, to step forward to mediate the dispute. Soon, however, he announced, "The company wasn't ready to negotiate in good faith."
A march of thousands through downtown Sacramento, led by Arturo Rodriguez, who had succeeded Cesar Chavez as president of the UFW, drew upon the farm worker organizing legacy, as did a week-long fast in the newly rechristened Cesar Chavez Park. Finally, the Sacramento Justice for Janitors campaign, now in full flower, marched one hundred and fifty miles along Highway 80 in February 1998 to HP's headquarters in Cupertino, much of the peregrenacion in a torrential rainstorm.
The march solidified support among the janitors' community and labor allies, and provided unwelcome publicity to a HP shareholders meeting occurring at the same time. Following protracted negotiations, Local 1877 and Somers signed a contract in March 1999.
Secret of their success
Local 1877 faced, in Apple, HP, Oracle and the other digital giants, completely non-union global corporations, companies that had come into existence during the anti-labor Reagan era. But what initially seemed an advantage to the companies—a protective layer of hip market culture surrounding the new technologies, their industry and products—hid a vulnerability to image problems soon exploited by the union. Combined with a mobilized and militant immigrant workforce, and a supportive coalition of labor, political, and community allies, adverse publicity forced these new economic goliaths to push their building service contractors to the table, where they conceded union recognition and better compensation to their workers.
In the middle of the Sacramento campaign, SEIU consolidated Local 1877 into a statewide structure. The move reflected the traditional union understanding that concentrated power of the employers had to be matched with concentrated worker power. It created an efficient platform, similar to the longshore caucus of the ILWU, capable of mobilizing member support from around the state for local actions and negotiations, with the entire repertoire of research, legal filings, direct action, public embarrassment for bad employers, and political connections.
By the early twenty first century, the Justice for Janitors campaign had reestablished a solid foothold in an industry difficult to organize. Despite all the obstacles, it had organized twenty thousand janitors, providing them with a collective vehicle for their advancement.
And SEIU and Justice for Janitors were not completely alone in organizing successes with California's immigrant workers. In the 1990s in Los Angeles, Maria Elena Durazo, a former staffer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (and currently a California state senator), led strong hotel worker organizing drives with HERE Local 11 among the industry's multi-ethnic workforce. The United Brotherhood of Carpenters, which had lost control of residential dry-walling to non-union contractors in the 1980s, recovered some of that ground by supporting a rank and file-led, southern California-wide strike wave of three thousand Mexican immigrants, los drywaleros, in 1992.
Some explosions of militancy hit the newspapers, made a splash, did some good for workers, and receded, like a 1990 wildcat strike of eight hundred mostly Latino workers at American Racing Equipment, a Rancho Dominguez wheel manufacturer, and a port truckers' strike in 1996 of five thousand "independent contractors" in the Port of Los Angeles. The 1990 strike gained a union when the workers voted to affiliate with the IAM. The truckers' strike collapsed without one.
Apart from the hostile political atmosphere of the 1980s and 90s, immigrant workers lacked consistent union support and leadership. This was nothing new; unsteady union assistance has been a hallmark of immigrant worker organizing in California from at least the time of the 1903 Oxnard Beet Workers strike onward. As yet another instance, a multi-union effort to organize the Alameda Corridor—a swath of light industrial enterprises employing hundreds of thousands of mostly immigrant, mostly non-union workers stretching from downtown to the L.A. harbor—began with hoopla and promise. But within a few years, the Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project crashed and burned when its sole remaining union, the Teamsters, went through a change in national leadership and abandoned the campaign.
Something closer to that steadying influence was provided by Miguel Contreras, another former Chavista and organizer for HERE sent to Los Angeles in the late 1980s. Elected head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor in 1996, Contreras reshaped the political scene in the former "scabbiest city on earth" through union-led registration drives among immigrant voters. Under his leadership, Los Angeles became one of the most successful examples of political power exercised by a strong labor movement, in large part because its workplace organizing insisted on militant direct action at the center of its tactics. Contreras helped steer the national AFL-CIO in its transition toward fully embracing immigrant labor's cause as its own.
As unions shrank in the late twentieth century, imaginative new collective strategies for helping workers emerged. Charting different paths to immigrant organizing, activists within alternative forms of worker resistance were nonetheless aware of and influenced by the ideas and historic successes of Justice for Janitors. And for good reason. When janitorial unionism in California seemed mired in the general decline of labor in the 1980s, immigrant workers somehow turned things around.
The simple equation behind the success of the Justice for Janitors campaign is that SEIU wanted to organize, and the new immigrant workforce, carrying militant labor and other politically progressive traditions from their countries of origin, wanted to be organized. This segment of the new working poor—a growing portion of the population as economic inequality grew following the Reagan years—comprised people who labored as hard and as well as they could, but saw no ladder up from poverty to the receding horizon of the California Dream. In that way they resembled native-born workers facing the same forces.
The precise difference between the janitors of Local 1877 and other low wage workers is that they organized. As a result, instead of pulling down the low end of the economic structure in a race to the bottom of the global economy, they tugged it, even if only slightly, upwards.
Fred Glass is a member of East Bay DSA, the former communications director of the California Federation of Teachers, and the author of From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement (UC Press, 2016).